JOYCE's CONSTRUCTION OF INTERNAL SPEECH IN V. PELEVIN's NOVEL “THE LIFE OF INSECTS”

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the poetics of the novels by J. Joyce “Ulysses” and V. Pelevin “The Life of Insects”. Afore in J. Joyce's speech, speech ceases to correlate subject-object relations, turning into an independent substance, and in V. Pelevin's speech dematerialization occurs simultaneously with this process. It is important for V. Pelevin, that Joyce's techniques change the author's status, calling into question his existence as such. The article highlights general strategies for mastering someone else's word, general principles of reflection on speech models of the world, which ultimately turns into a principle of structural reassembly of universes of authors, combining both forward movement and a constant return to the origins, the desire to automate the text and the termination of any kind of dependence on reality (including thoughts and texts that are born in this universe), cyclism and movement in a circle.

The Thinking Fetus: Descartes at the Brink of Psychoanalysis

Descartes’s philosophy of the passions is central for an understanding of seventeenth-century ideas of affects and emotions and for the history of emotions overall. But does it have bearing today? In this article, I argue that Descartes raises the question of how the infantile relation to the maternal body influences the emotional life of the adult, a question that is still relevant for psychoanalysis and neuropsychology. In the philosophical scholarship on Descartes, the passages which pertain to the infant, or the fetus, and its alleged ‘confused thought’, are often quoted to demonstrate the challenges to dualism that are inherent in his own writings. However, I argue that these discussions point also to the complexity of the development of affects and emotions. In my reading, I show that Descartes’s ideas of the passions can be seen as precursory to psychoanalytic theories of object relations. This opens the way for a new trajectory of research involving fantasy, instincts and repression in the Cartesian analysis of emotions and affects.

An introduction to the International Psychotherapy Institute’s adult psychotherapy programme in China

In response to an invitation from the Chinese mental health platform, Jiandanxinli, and its CEO Li Zhen, the International Psychotherapy Institute developed and implemented a two-year training programme, “Object relations psychoanalytic psychotherapy” to be held on-site in Beijing, and online weekly. This contribution begins with an example of the teaching intrinsic to the programme, and then describes the programme itself.

Coarse-to-Fine Hand–Object Pose Estimation with Interaction-Aware Graph Convolutional Network

The analysis of hand–object poses from RGB images is important for understanding and imitating human behavior and acts as a key factor in various applications. In this paper, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine two-stage framework for hand–object pose estimation, which explicitly models hand–object relations in 3D pose refinement rather than in the process of converting 2D poses to 3D poses. Specifically, in the coarse stage, 2D heatmaps of hand and object keypoints are obtained from RGB image and subsequently fed into pose regressor to derive coarse 3D poses. As for the fine stage, an interaction-aware graph convolutional network called InterGCN is introduced to perform pose refinement by fully leveraging the hand–object relations in 3D context. One major challenge in 3D pose refinement lies in the fact that relations between hand and object change dynamically according to different HOI scenarios. In response to this issue, we leverage both general and interaction-specific relation graphs to significantly enhance the capacity of the network to cover variations of HOI scenarios for successful 3D pose refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our approach on benchmark hand–object datasets.

Abject Object Relations and Epistemic Engagement in Clinical Practice

The article engages with medical practice to develop a philosophically informed understanding of epistemic engagement in medicine, and epistemic object relations more broadly. I take point of departure in the clinal encounter and draw on French psychoanalytical theory to develop and expand a taxonomy already proposed by Karin Knorr-Cetina. Doing so, I argue for the addition of an abject type object relation, that is, the encounter with objects that transgress frameworks and disrupt further investigation, hence preventing dynamic engagement and negatively shaping our epistemic pathways. The article is primarily theoretical although partly grounded in qualitative fieldwork.

The possible impact of animals on Job’s body image: A psychoanalytical perspective

The body plays an important role in the book of Job – as do animals. According to psychoanalytical specifically object-relations theory, a subjective body image was partly constructed through the internalisation of external stimuli from significant others who mirrored the subject through their feedback or through their own bodies, which served as an ideal or critique to the subject. Amongst the external stimuli, animals constitute such significant others. Animals could therefore have impacted Job’s subjective body image, particularly as their bodies were described in detail by God as a response to Job’s complaints and searching.Contribution: Two theoretical and interrelated problems were acknowledged although they cannot be satisfactorily solved: the cultural aspect of the body image and the relationship to animals.